Battered worshiper syndrome

There's a lie they tell in some parts that if you are following God, you will never be hurt.

Like the best lies, it has a germ of truth at the heart of it, twisted just so, so that the meaning of that truth is lost with its context and people trusting in a promise that was never made, rush headlong into disaster. You're told that if you have faith, you can overcome any affliction; that if you are following God, he will protect you from the fowler's snare, and on and on.

It's a crock. Pain is inevitable. As a wise man once observed, "Life is pain. Anyone who says different is trying to sell you something."

The Church with a Trendy Name has a monthly tradition called Philosophy on Tap, where about twenty of us get together at one of the pubs in Nova Bastille and discuss weighty issues like the Problem of Evil over beer. Not everyone who goes, attends the church; and not everyone who attends is necessarily a Christian. It's about the marketplace of ideas.

This past Monday, the question was about the balancing act between faith and reason; viz., Does faith trump reason, does reason nullify faith, or (more likely) how do the two interact? We were about ninety minutes into the talk, and discussion had wandered slightly, as discussions do; and we were talking about how faith sometimes just doesn't know when to quit. These are the moments where you are wracked with pain so deep that your only prayer is a heart-wrenching sob, and reason knows there's been a bait-and-switch and the show playing is not what was on the schedule. Faith persists.

Sometimes these moments come unexpectedly, after periods of great joy and spiritual ecstasy, when God has led the believer to a fantastic height and is letting her drink in the glorious view. The believer is lost in the wonder of the moment, and she doesn't even realize that she's standing on a precipice, until after God has pushed her off.

Other times, you walk into these moments in a willful obedience marked by a growing unease as the lights along the path begin to flicker and fail one at a time. You walk on, trusting that the Shepherd will see you through, while the shadows deepen and eager whispers spring up all around the thin nimbus of light that rapidly is fading into black. And then the light fails, you discover that your guide has vanished, the only path visible is the part right under your feet, and you know that one wrong step means destruction.

"God seems to take some sort of delight in getting us to that point, doesn't he?" I said, with a nod to "The Screwtape Letters": "Our plight is never more in danger than when one of these Christians, willing, but no longer desiring to obey, looks at a creation from which all signs of God seem to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

"And yet," offered one of our resident doctors of philosophy, "we have to assume that God has a good purpose for this, because he loves us."

"I don't know," I said, mostly to be ornery. "If you went home and your wife beat you senseless; and yet you defended the bruises and broken bones and other injuries, on the grounds that she really loves you and had a good reason for what she had done, I think there'd be a problem in your relationship, don't you?"

The comment got a few laughs, as I knew it would, but during a brief break while everybody kept the bartender busy with more orders, I took a moment to talk to the good doctor a bit more seriously.

"So what purpose would it serve?" I asked, in complete honesty. I didn't go into the sordid details with my friend, but God's scalpel cuts deep. Whether God abandoned you in the dark or pushed you off a cliff, it's not an experience you forget easily. The "Why?" simmers on the backburner long after the main course has been finished. "I can accept on faith that there's a purpose, but it'd be nice sometimes to get a clue."

"It would have to be something good for us," my friend put forth. "Or God would be as monstrous as your example suggests, and that doesn't match up."

"But what?" I repeated, and my friend drew the example of courage. A hero may display courage easily when there is someone else to protect him and to make sure he gets home unharmed, but when the hero doesn't have that support and still acts heroically, his heroism is more heroic -- and, my friend pointed out, it allows the wounded hero to better gauge the cost of heroism, and decide if the virtue is worth the cost.

"Or," I said, feeling an old wound heal just a little more, "it allows someone to decide that love is worth the pain, for its own sake."

Some people will tell that if you follow Christ, you will never be hurt. You'll overcome hardship, you'll be victorious in the face of difficulty, and God will not allow your foot to be dashed against the rocks. It's a bald-faced lie. Christ himself promises poverty, hardship and even death to the people who follow him.

All I can say is that whether he pushes you off the cliff, or leaves you in the Valley of Shadow, it hurts like hell. But in the end, by faith, I have to agree: It's still worth it, because he is.


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Crisis of Faith

It's always interesting to see what children notice when you read them Bible stories.

Back in February, Evangeline was puzzled by the bizarre encounter between God and Moses recounted in "Zipporah at the Inn." Other times, the girls have alternately been grossed out or entertained by some of the stories contained in the book of Judges. And tonight, the part of the Bible that came real to Evangeline was in 1 Samuel 7, just before Samuel leads the Israelites against the Philistines at Mizpah.

Contextually, this battle takes place about 20 years after the Israelites suffered the crushing loss of the Ark of the Covenant to the Philistines; and after the Philistines sent the Ark back rather than endure the plagues the biblical account lists them suffering after the ark was captured. (Among other things, their god broke, their cities were plagued with rats, and a bunch of people suffered terrible hemorrhoids.)

The story in 1 Samuel 7 represents a turnaround in Israel's fortune. They've regained the ark, they've stopped worshiping the Baals and the Ashtoreths, and by the time the chapter has ended, they're going to have broken free of their Philistine rulers, at least for a while. It's an inspiring story.

What Evangeline noticed was this: "Samuel took a suckling lamb and offered it up as a whole burnt offering to the LORD."

"A suckling lamb?" she interrupted. "It was still drinking its mother's milk?"

"Well, yes," I said, and started to explain the Israelite sacrificial code. "They would offer a young lamb that had never eaten anything but milk, because it was valuable, and --"

"That's horrible!"

She was crying. It was past bedtime, and she'd had a busy day, but this caught me completely off-guard. A dozen different responses jostled on my tongue. The theologian wanted to explain the typological importance of the lamb as it foreshadowed Christ's sacrifice; the former evangelical wanted to explain that this is the cost of our sin; the religion scholar wanted to explain the significance of animal sacrifice in the religion of ancient Israel.

Another voice was considering how my daughter was anthropomorphizing a sheep, and projecting her own imagined fear onto a farm animal 3,000 years ago. Those responses and others jostled on my lips for a chance to be uttered, and all died there as a wiser part of me put the Bible down, and wrapped my arms around her.

"You're right," I said, as she cried silently over something that happened all the time in the lives of the ancient Israelites. "It is horrible."

I held her some more, while the Bible story lay unread and unfinished on the bed, and then asked her, "Do you think God wanted these sheep killed?"

She shook her head vehemently, no.

"I think you're right," I said, certain that a few people I know would take issue with such a statement. "One of the psalmists wrote 'You do not delight in sacrifice, O Lord, or I would bring it; but a broken heart and a contrite spirit are all your desire.' I don't think God wanted all these animals killed, especially like this, and I'm glad that's done."

We finished the story, we prayed, and I left the room so she could go to sleep.

In her own way, at her own level, I think Evangeline has just begun her first crisis of faith. She's come face to face with an unpleasant situation in the Bible, one where God doesn't come across as nice as his press agents and publicists make him out to be, and she's having to figure out how and if she can reconcile it. It's a journey that may take her all sorts of interesting places once she takes her first step in earnest.

And how striking if it should begin with such an innocent-seeming story.


Copyright © 2010 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Struck by the thunderous magic of Thor

About twenty-five years ago, I discovered a fantastic comic book called "The Mighty Thor."

I'd read the odd issue or two of Thor before, but it never caught my interest like it did this time. Written and drawn by Walt Simonson, the comic was well into a story that had suddenly spilled across nearly every comic book published by Marvel Comics. The Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and even Rom Spaceknight were dealing with unseasonable snow storms. Something called the Casket of Ancient Winters had been broken, and the end of the world was quite possibly approaching.

Simonson, I would discover, was quite a fan of Norse mythology. In less than two years' time on the title, he had transformed Thor from another superhero in a cape into a being of literally mythic stature. He wasn't fighting some random bad guy who wanted to take over the world; he was smack in the middle of Ragnarok, the Norse Doomsday in which Surtur would stride forth from Muspelheim to destroy the Nine Worlds in a fiery holocaust.

I was a late arrival to the story, but I was hooked. Simonson's writing and his art possessed a raw energy that I'd never seen in a comic before; his characters were unique and engaging; and I loved mythology. After one issue actually ended with Surtur lowering his sword into the eternal flame to set it ablaze, I nearly went berserk having to wait an entire month for the next issue to come out.

Thor and his allies won, of course, but the changes even that victory brought to the title and to the character of Thor were stunning. More story arcs followed, some sillier than others, until Simonson finally concluded his run by matching Thor against his mythological foe, Jormangandur, the world serpent. For those who don't know the myth, at Ragnarok, Thor slays Jormangandur, takes nine steps, and dies. Simonson pretty much followed the script on that one too.

Years later, I've come to appreciate what an amazing job Simonson did on "The Mighty Thor." Many comic book writers will tell one story after another; he told one long story consisting of several smaller, self-contained story arcs. It began with the destruction of a distant galactic core on Page One of his first issue, and didn't end until he brought everything to a satisfying conclusion in the issue following the battle with the world serpent.

Along the way, Simonson gave us Beta Ray Bill, brought us through Ragnarok, took Odin out of the picture, gave Thor a beard and Viking armor, and took some very deep and fascinating forays into Norse myth. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced Thor to Marvel Comics, but Walt Simonson is the one who truly made him Thor.

I have a few friends who used to read comic books and who now tell me when the subject comes up that they stopped reading them years ago. Fair enough; I can get just as tired of capes and costumes as anyone else. You know that Peter Parker's spider-sense will warn him before the bad guy gets the drop on him; you know that Lex Luthor will fail once again to stop Superman. It's one of the hazards of an industry where the heroes have to stay in the same essential cycle, lest their identity shift too much and they lose their appeal.

Still, when they're done right, superheroes have the same mythic appeal that the original Thor did, to the people who huddled in Heorot while winter lashed the doorposts and timbers and Grendel roamed the marsh. A good writer brings that out, by exploring the superhero metaphor in a different way, as Frank Miller did with "The Dark Knight Returns"; by making us look at them in a new light, as Mark Waid did with Superman in "Birthright"; or just by going back to the source material, like Simonson did with Thor.

When they're merely done competently, superhero comics are as ho-hum as any other popular novel. When they're done this well, they're worth reading again and again. They're also worth passing on.

Several years ago, Marvel began reprinting comics from its Jim Shooter years under its "Marvel Visionaries" imprint. Not surprisingly, Simonson's run on "The Mighty Thor" was included in those reprints. And not surprisingly, since I missed about half his run, what with one thing and another, I've made the effort to add these to my collection of trade paperbacks.

About six weeks ago, I handed the first volume to Evangeline to read, if she was interested. It took her a little while to get interested, but by the time the Casket of Ancient Winters came into play, it wasn't my enthusiasm that was driving her any more.

Twenty-five years after it first found its way into my life, the magic of Thor's enchanted hammer had caught her too.


Copyright © 2010 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Pensoj

Mi scivolas se mia geedziĝa estas finata.

Mi geedziĝis kun mia edzino antaŭ preskaŭ dekdu jaroj, konante ŝi antaŭe tri jaroj. Kiam ni geedziĝis, mi kredis ke nia amo sufus por tutaj niaj vivoj. Sed, ni estas tie ĉi nun, kaj mi ne povas diri ke mi konas se ŝi plu amas min ... aŭ se mi plu amas ŝin.

Kiel ni venis al tian lokon? Kiel povas du geviroj, kiuj diris ke ili amos ĉiam, rivi kie ili ĉiam, aŭ preskaŭ ĉiam, koleras? Mi ne povas feliĉigi ŝin plu. Kiam ŝi leviĝas matene, ŝi parolas kolere al mi; kiam ŝi revenas al hejmo poste sia laboro, ŝi parolas kolere al mi. Estas kiel ŝi ĉiam koleras, al mi, al aliulo, al ĉiuj kaj al ĉiojn. Kaj kiam ŝi koleras, ŝi uzas vortojn malbonegajn. Hieraŭ mi devis fermi la porton de la ĉam ke ŝi estis, ĉar ŝi estis kolerdiranta "Fiku tion! Fiku! Fiku!" denove kaj denove, unu foje poste alia. Ŝi ofte faras tion, kaj mi ja dormemas de tio.

Mi ja dormemas, kaj mi ne povas kontinui tiel. Hodiaŭ vespere, mi demandis de mi se mi povas kontinui geedziĝe tiel, kaj mi komprenis ke mi ne povas. Ni jam geedziĝas dekdu jarej. Kiel oni kontinui tiel por kvardek jaroj ke ankoraŭ venas? Kiel oni kontinui tiel por tridek jaroj ke ankoraŭ venas? Dudek? Mi ne povas, kaj mi ne certas ke estas iu kiu povas, sen feliĉeco sufa por diri "Mi amas mian edzinon."

Mi ne certas plu se ŝi plu amas min. Estas kiel nia geedziĝo mortis.

Ankaŭ, ni havas tri gefiloj; la plijunaj aĝas malpli unu jaro.

Mi ne volas por ili grandiĝas kun deedziĝo de ilia gepatroj ... sed mi ankaŭ ne volas por ili grandiĝas kun la kolero de sia patrino ĉiam kie ŝi estas.

Sinjoro Eternulo, aŭskultas mian preĝon, kaj trovigu por mi la respondon de tia problemo, ĉar mi ne scias via vojo.

Your message gets lost when there's too much information

There's an old saying in the news business: Less is more.

The point is that, often, being succinct communicates the message much more effectively than excessive verbiage. Flowery speech can sound impressive, but usually it just sounds pretentious. Give 'em the facts, get straight to the point, and let them decide.

This principle even can apply to personal communication as well. Including too much information can ruin the effect of your intended speech, and hopelessly garble your message.

"I love you" is probably the most beautiful thing to say in any language. Still sweet, but a little less impressive, is the declaration, "I love you more than anyone." But your point is lost forever if you go on from there: "I love you more than my ex-girlfriend, and more than my co-worker Sally. Oh, and you remember Laura from the party last month? I love you more than her. And I love you heaps more than the barista at Starbuck's. She means nothing to me." By this point, the chances are good that the speaker has dimmed the flames of passion for a good many days to come, if not for all time.

This is a lesson teachers should heed as well. No one could ever fault someone for saying "I decided to become a teacher because I love children." Expect pushback should you ever say, "I decided to become a teacher because I love 12-year-olds."

Because sometimes, you know, it's just a good idea to leave well enough alone.


Copyright © 2010 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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My friend the jackal

Job's wife gets one line in the book, and we all roast her for that.

"Are you still holding onto your integrity?" she asks him, as he sits in the ruins of his life, scraping the sores that ooze all over his body, with a shard of broken pottery. The poor man is numb with grief over the deaths of his ten children as she confronts him, mad with her own grief and loss. "Curse God and die!"

Meanwhile Job's friends browbeat him for 36 chapters, telling him that he's only getting what he deserves. Job's wife merely wanted his suffering to end. These vultures won't be happy until he's really suffered, and yet we calmly discuss them as merely errant in their thinking.


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Tears deferred still come due

It wasn't until I held the baby that I cried.

I had been at the Centre Hospitaliere du Sacre Coeur in Port-au-Prince since about nine o'clock that morning. Lord knows, there had been plenty of reasons to cry before then. The parking lot of the medical center, after all, was a tent city of sorts, providing shelter to some 56 people who had suffered some form of injury following Haiti's disastrous earthquake on Jan. 12.

For starters, there was Joshua. It's hard to tell how old he is, but his future looks like it will be a bleak one. He suffers from club feet and cerebral palsy, two conditions that are difficult anywhere, but especially in the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.

Sitting with Joshua, it's hard to feel down. He can't speak any language that I know, but he smiles constantly and he loves to smack his eager hands onto yours. You can turn it into a game, where he tries to smack your hand before you can move it away, and he cracks up when he misses. Or you can let him get into an easy rhythm, clap-clap-clap, and he finds it hysterical you do something unexpected and suddenly change the rules.

The head nurse at the clinic told me that Joshua's mom wants him back because his condition makes him useful as a beggar. A brutal story if true, but that didn't make me cry.

Then there's Katura. She's a vivacious little girl; in the United States she would be attending kindergarten and mastering the fundamentals of reading and writing. Instead, because she lost her right leg above the knee in the earthquake, she's sleeping in a tent in the parking lot of a hospital, and getting around in a bright red wheelchair.

The skin has mostly closed up over her wound, and when the medical crews change the dressing on her wounds, it's a perfunctory thing. It doesn't ooze and it doesn't seem to hurt her at all. God willing, she'll be outfitted with a prosthetic device and can begin the task of learning to walk all over again.

She has a long road ahead of her, but I didn't cry when I played with her.

Or there was Karl. He's a little bit older than Ketura, probably somewhere between the ages of my two older daughters. When I met him on Thursday, he was quiet, but not with the quiet of deep thought. He was overwhelmed by all that had happened, from the devastation to his country down to the fracture in his left patella that had left him in a wheelchair.

I did everything I could to get a smile out of Karl, but nothing worked.

Still, when I had wheeled him to the door outside the X-ray room and asked him if he wanted me to stay with him, he said yes. So I sat there, and told him jokes, and showed him a picture of my infant daughter, and when they had finished the X-ray imaging, I wheeled him back to the parking lot where he and the other patients have been living.

I felt deeply for him, and wished I could bridge the gulf between us to bring him comfort and assurance, but still I didn't cry.

There are others there, with stories too horrible to think about. There is a woman with a pressure wound so bad that you can put your entire hand into her side; there are adults and children alike with braces screwed into their legs to immobilize the pieces of shattered bone, but I expected horrible injuries when I came to Haiti, so while I ache for them, I didn't cry.

But then there were the babies. Twins, they were born last August and came to the hospital some time with a minor injury that has since healed. They have no home to go to, their mother has no way of providing for them, and so they have been allowed to stay in a tent out of compassion and a sense of human decency.

Their lives are so innocent, their needs so simple, and their promise is unbridled.

I picked one of them up, and I held her in arms that have missed another baby for the past four days.

And then I cried.


Copyright © 2010 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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After the quake: pressure wounds and delayed treatment

The doctors told me the woman had been trapped under the rubble of her house for days.

When an earthquake shook Haiti to its foundations on Jan. 12, she was one of the lucky ones. Unlike an estimated 200,000 people killed in the earthquake, she survived. And unlike other adults and several children staying at the clinic with her, the debris that fell on her didn't break her bones or require doctors to amputate her limbs.

But she was trapped and unable to move until rescuers freed her.

The human body, with its grand design of skeleton and muscle, is meant to be a poem of smooth motion. But when it is held still for days on end, as this woman's body was, the rhythm of the poetry is ruined. The concrete pressed down on her leg, and cut off the flow of blood.

When there is no relief from the tremendous pressure, the skin breaks down and splits open; and as the pressure continues, additional tissue dies.

"For some people, the pressure wound has gone so deep that it's gone all the way to the bone," said Krista Duval, a doctor of osteopathic medicine from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. "These people will have very serious scars for the rest of their lives."

Krista was one of 18 people on a medical team that left from Quisqueya Crisis Relief Center on Thursday to run a medical clinic at at the Centre Hospitaliere du Sacré Coeur, in downtown Port-au-Prince. The medical team treated some 100 people who came to the clinic that day, as well as another 56 who have been living in tents in the parking lot of the medical center.

While several of those patients are receiving physical therapy and followup treatment to amputations that were needed after Haiti's horrific Jan. 12 quake, many others are receiving treatment for other injuries serious in their own right, such as the pressure wounds suffered by this woman.

Treatment takes time and patience. Gauze dressings must be changed at least daily, and a steady regimen of antibiotics contains the threat posed by infection.

Time, patience, and medical personnel. Most visiting medical crews leave Haiti after a week or two, and unfortunately, Haiti still lacks the infrastructure to provide the long-term medical care these patients need.

When the earthquake struck on Jan. 12, it destroyed more than an ability to provide immediate care for the victims of the quake. It also brought crashing to the ground the country's ability to provide long-term care in the weeks and months that are still to follow.

That was particularly in evidence on Friday. The medical center we visited is an 18-bed private hospital located a short distance from the wreckage of the National Cathedral. The building, although it survived the earthquake and the many aftershocks that have followed, is badly damaged.  The hospital is still standing, and doctors and nurses working with teams from the Quisqueya Crisis Relief Center have been able to use its equipment, but until repairs can be made, the hospital is effectively closed.

And hospitals and medical care remain in great need. On the day I joined the medical team, there were some 100 patients who came to the clinic. That number has dropped from the  average of 300 that visited the clinic when it first opened, but it remains high.

In the parking lot of the medical center stand a dozen tents, housing 56 men, women and children suffering from injuries suffered in the quake, or caring for those who had.

"Every day we discharge a few and admit one or two," said Beth Milbourne, 30, a registered nurse at Greenville Memorial Hospital in South Carolina who quit her job in the United States and moved to Haiti three weeks  ago. She has been going to the clinic at the medical center every day since.

One of the patients admitted Friday was an elderly man who required an operation because of an obstructed urinary tract. Dave Drozek, a general surgeon from Ohio University who performed the surgery, spoke to me a moment about the operation as orderlies lowered the patient onto a makeshift cot under a tent in the parking lot.

"We're transitioning to more regular day-to-day needs," Dave said of the work he'd been doing that week at the clinic.

But, as he also noted, many of those needs have been delayed because of the pressing nature of the trauma inflicted by the quake.


 Copyright © 2010 by David Learn. Used with permission.



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On the eve of going to Haiti: Letter to myself, age 22

Dear 22-year-old self,e

In a sense, this may be one of the most pointless things I have ever written, since it comes 17 years and some months too late to make a difference in the trip you are about to take to Haiti, but foolish or not, I am writing it.

I know that you're still upstairs, somewhere, wearing clothes that haven't fit me in years and that were never exactly fashionable in the first place, so I write this in the hope that it will do some good, somehow. Often the value is not in the hearing, but in the saying.

Right now, you're pretty excited about the trip you'll be taking in two days. This is something you've been looking forward to since January 1991. You remember that, right? That was when you took a short-term missions trip to LaGonave with STEM Ministries, while everyone else in the college fellowship headed to Urbana, Ill., for the big missions conference.

You didn't say much at the time to the others on your team, but the experience was one that you found to be deeply meaningful. There was that moment in LaSource where you realized that Pentecostalism wasn't what you had thought it was; and then there was that boy, Samuel, whose stomach was distended, whose hair was going red from malnutrition, and who you learned hadn't eaten a decent meal in weeks.

So, as I say, you're keen to be headed back to Haiti, to work with STEM. You're an idealist at heart, and since the Peace Corps called to say they were ready to assign you in Africa, and then called back 15 minutes later to say, "Never mind, we just realized you're an evangelical Christian," you've been looking forward to the door that it appears God has opened for you. No Fortune 500 job for you, you are going to make a difference!

Oh, Dave, you're such an idiot. You really have no idea what's going to happen, do you? Over the next two years, everything is going to hit the fan. Everything.

For starters, you're going to see need - real need. Not like the men at the homeless shelter you volunteered at one night your freshman year, who had a place to stay and food to eat because the United States has the wealth to feed its indigents when we want to.

No, we're talking the sort of need that comes when you have 8 million people in a nation where $3 is a decent day's wages and most people are unemployed. It's the sort of need where children sleep on the concrete driveway of the Jamaican restaurant on Route de Delmas. It's the sort of need where 14-year-olds are so underfed that they look like they might be 8.

It's a need that will slap you in the face every time you step out the door and interact with the people. The beggars in particular will overwhelm you. Some will be adults and some will be children; some will be sincere and some will merely be con men preying on you.

There will be no escaping that need. It will greet you when you wake up in the morning, it will haunt you when you get something to eat, and it will steal its way into your dreams. No matter how many times you discuss it with others, no matter how often you pray about it, and no matter how you try to rationalize your way around it, you will never make peace with it. Never.

One by one, your illusions are going to fail. Right now you have some pretty naive ideas about Christians, about Christianity, and about missionaries. You understand Christianity as forgiveness of sins, Christians as American-style conservatives, and missionaries as bastions of indomitable faith in God.

Over the next two years, you're going to realize the inadequacy of evangelicalism to deal with the problem of suffering and need; you're going to begin appreciating just how radically liberal Jesus was in his social attitudes, and you're going to discover that missionaries are just as human as the people in your church back home. Many missionaries whom you meet will disappoint you, just as you will disappoint them.

Incidentally, God is going to die while you're in Haiti. It'll be a combination of things that will finally do the old bugger in, but one day the light will fail and you will start crawling around on all fours in the dark to find the body. Eventually you will, and you'll wonder how you ever thought such a sad and miserable thing was worthy of worship.

Which is not to say it'll be all bad in Haiti, because it won't be. It'll be two of the hardest years of your life, but even though it sets you on a path that ultimately destroys the evangelical brand of faith that took you there, you will treasure your time in Haiti for the rest of your life.

You're going to meet some tremendous people and have some tremendous experiences that will still shape you years later. There'll be the Haitian church services you attend, particularly the ones with Herve; there will be the time you realize that while it hurts to turn away 200 hungry children, at least you were able to help feed 300 others; and there will be friendships with people like Elizabeth Gerritesen, Brian VanWyhe and Dan Kramer; with Tammy Lynn Johnston; with Rick Root; and with the Murphys and the Herseys.

(There is a funny story about how you meet the Murphys. I wonder sometimes if Lonnie remembers it, or what her kindergartners called you.)

The reception you get when you return Stateside will be underwhelming. I hate to say this, but your own pastor is going to dismiss what you did as "not missions work." and from time to time, the lack of interest other people have in your experiences there will lead you to question whether you really accomplished anything. Sometimes the loudest voice there will be the one in your head.

Ignore the gainsayers. The difference you make to the people you meet will be real and lasting, especially when you become a teacher. A Jewish tradition holds that to teach a child is to be as a parent to her. In less than a year of teaching, you will have 40 children who will never forget you, nor the lessons you teach them.

It's going to come to an end far too soon for you, and when it does, it won't end nicely. I haven't liked that ending for 15 years now, and frankly, I think it's time for the curtain to rise on a second act.

Now 39,

Dave Learn



Copyright © 2010 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Ebooks and the storied history of reading

I don't like ebooks.

I'm sure the convenience of carrying an entire library in your bag is a wonderful thing, and like others before me, I'm all for reducing waste and conserving resources. And of course I adore the idea of being able to keep books "in print" in perpetuity. I've never been able to find a copy of "The Elder Edda" in translation when I've looked, but there's no reason to believe that would be a problem with an ebook reader in my hands. There's so much to appreciate about ebooks, really.

I can't do it, though.

The reasons for this disinterest are all around me. They're the 1930 edition of Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" and "The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" that used to belong to my grandfather, the copy of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's "Good Omens" that I have read a half-dozen times in the past ten years, and the hundreds of other books that line almost every room of my house.

Books are more than just stories; they are memories. There is the trip I took to Alaska in 1988 while I was reading "Paradise Lost," the conversation I had with Steve Hersey about "The Divine Comedy" in Port-au-Prince, the time I woke my roommate by talking in my sleep about "The Brothers Karamazov," and the tears I shed over the final chapter of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame."

Sometimes these memories are marked in the book with little notes, bent pages or other tells, and sometimes not; but the associations are always strongest with the copy I was reading at the time. The story may be the same in another edition or copy, but the pages I have are old friends, and they know me just as I know them.

In the end, books are more than just the words that they contain. They are sensations. A book is the rustle of paper as you turn the page, it is the rough yellowed fibers under your fingers. It is the ache in your hand that you're vaguely conscious of after holding the book open one-handed for an hour while you were doing something else.

And just as books are connections to their previous owners, so they also are bridges to our children. Already I've been able to hand my daughter treasured books from my childhood and watch as the exact same words on the exact same pages carry her away in wonder, horror, and awe. It doesn't matter if it's "Something Under the Bed is Drooling" or Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein." It's my book, and it's having its effect all over again.

Ebooks do none of this.

They read well enough, it's true, without the too-bright gleam of a computer, and as for transporting eager readers to realms of wonder, I am sure they do that as well. But it's also hard to imagine building a sentimental attachment to an ebook. "Here, Evangeline," I can't imagine myself saying. "I've had this computer file since I was your age. I'd like you to have it now."

Gone also are the other thrills of books. The wonder of walking into a bookstore to find something new to read, the thrill of running my eyes along a shelf of books for a familiar friend to read and rediscover, and the delicious smell of old books in a library either personal or public -- those are all gone with an ebook. All that is left of the selection process is a sterile screen and an experience no more transporting than browsing the Internet for something to buy.

Books are friends; books are life. An ebook is neither. It might as well be a jpeg or text file for all the emotional attachment it will get.

Something else ebooks lack: permanency. When I read a book, I can put it down for a day, a week, a year, or even a decade. When I return, I know not only that the book will still be there, but also that its contents won't have changed. The same foolish typos, the same controversial language, the same bold ideas will still be exactly as I left them.

We've already seen with ebooks that this is not true. It was only in July 2009 that Amazon erased copies of "1984" and "Animal Farm" from the Kindles of customers who had bought them. Books that can be erased or that can be changed, are not books.

The marketing mavens believe that ebooks and ebook readers are the way of the future. I fear they are right; I hope they are not. For as long as I can, I am going to continue to read books the way I always have, and hope that my children will as well.


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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